Early Life and Education
Chong was born Grace Quek (Chinese: 郭盈恩; pinyin: Guō Yíng'ēn), and raised in Singapore in a middle-class Protestant Singaporean Chinese family. She was a student at Raffles Girls' School, where she was enlisted in the country's Gifted Education Programme, and Hwa Chong Junior College. Former teachers and classmates describe Chong as quiet, intelligent, and studious.
After taking her A levels, she took nearly three years off, including a year spent in the United States. She then went on to study law at King's College London under a scholarship. While in the United Kingdom, Chong got drunk on a train, where she met a man and agreed to have sex with him in an alleyway. He brought along other men, and she was gang raped and robbed in a rubbish closet under an inner-city housing block.
At the age of 21, Chong dropped out of law school and went on to graduate studies in photography, art, and gender studies at the University of Southern California (USC), where she excelled academically. She also began working in pornographic films. Chong went on to graduate work in gender studies at USC.
Chong presented her work in pornography as an attempt to challenge the settled notions and assumptions of viewers about female sexuality. For example, her conception of a gang bang was based on the example of Messalina, a wife of the emperor Claudius. Historically, Messalina had suffered a poor reputation, a fact that some attributed (at least partly) to gender bias. According to Chong, she sought to question the double standard that denies women the ability to exhibit the same sexuality as men, by modelling what a female "stud" would be.
Read more about this topic: Annabel Chong
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